Commentary by Michael Wade on Leadership, Ethics, Management, and Life

Friday, June 24, 2016

First Paragraph

The idea of a classless, fully egalitarian society first emerged in classical Greece. Ancient Greece happened to have been the first country in the world to recognize private property in land and to treat land as a commodity, and hence it was the first to confront the social inequalities that result from ownership. Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer (seventh century B.C.), in the poem Works and Days extolled a mythical "Golden Age" when people were not driven by the "shameful lust for gain," when there was an abundance of goods for all to share and mankind lived in perpetual peace. The theme of the Golden Age resounded in the writings of the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid; Ovid spoke of the time when the world knew nothing of "boundary posts and fences." - From Communism: A History by Richard Pipes